Do We Love Cameras for Their Brains or Their Bodies?

A camera carved from stone quarried in Cambodia–the same stone used to build Angkor Wat.

A Pentax K1000 cast in sand.

The Nikon Nikkormat FT made from sand.

Crushed glass Nikon Nikkormat FT and a black stone Canon EOS 6D.

Pentax K1000's made from plaster.

Requiem for a Pentax, in blue.

The exhibition Reach Ruin at the Fabric Workshop Museum in Philadelphia, which includes hundreds of camera sculptures made of glass, sand and stone, has us questioning a camera’s form over function.

Two plaster-cast Nikkormat and Pentax K1000 camera “armies” anchor the exhibition. The sculptures have the strange effect of separating feelings about a camera’s physical design from feelings about its ability to produce images. At Raw File, we’re proud of our camera-coveting, but we’ve never considered how much of our gear lust comes from what cameras do, and how much comes from the way they look and feel.

“Much of the time when we think about what a camera does, we think of it as a producer of images,” says the exhibit’s artist, Daniel Arsham, whose first camera was a Pentax K1000. “The object itself is not always what is important. The camera is not the cultural artifact, the image [it produces] is.”

Arsham, along with Alex Mustonen, is one half of Snarkitecture, a collaborative practice that explores the spaces between design, architecture, installation and fine art. Reach Ruin continues the grayscale preoccupations typical of Snarkitecture’s output.

“The reduction of color allows audiences to experience the formal qualities of things,” says Arsham, who discovered six years ago that he was color blind.

The exhibit also includes a dance performance where dancers use the plaster cameras like sidewalk chalk, drawing circles on the ground. As they do this, the cameras are used up and disintegrate.

“The choreographer has made a piece that feels very dystopian,” says Arsham. “The dancers hold the cameras wrong, they use them in ways they’re not supposed to. It is as if they don’t even know what the object is.”

The exhibit points out that while the camera’s design may have been created to serve its function, that design has now become its own form of art, whether or not the function remains.

“Many of us that use photography have a relationship with the object. If you want, call it a fetish, but the camera is definitely an object than can evoke strong feelings,” says Arsham.